One of the coolest things about writing about my interests on the internet and hosting an annual WONDER WANDER is a spectacular increase in my luck surface area, or as I like to call it: surface area for serendipity.

Back in November, fellow camera-wielding friend and wonderwanderer Kevin sent me an out-of-the-blue text message. Could Richard, a legally-blind-totally-tapped-into-it sound healer we met capturing Festival of Yes, crash at my place for a weekend, and would I want to help film some sound baths?

I recently had the grand privilege of speaking on Cosmic Consciousness and the inherent oneness of all things through an astronomical lens at the Festival of Yes.

Wandering through my near-death experience at sixteen, insights into the psychological growth process from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, the formation of the universe, wise words from Ed Abbey, Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, and John Frusciante, and ultimately offering contemplating the cosmos as a means of transcending our repression of “the primary miraculousness of creation,” it felt wildly out of the blue and well received.

A true legend — while running the festival — the Yesman managed to record the speech on his phone! I polished and uploaded the audio to YouTube for your listening pleasure.

This article offers a means to a more expansive perspective of reality by pointing to the size of the universe — a cosmic view of the vast reality in which our lives are taking place.

I find this perspective of immeasurable value and encourage you: take your time, watch the videos, dig the links.

Back in 2019, while walking the Annapurna Circuit through the Himalayas of Nepal, I spent a lot of time looking up. While all that looking up was prompted by those incredible mountains, my awareness kept catching on the daytime moon.

Yes or no — which is best? It’s a question that appears to need more context, but actually doesn’t.

Rather, the question of yes or no is about our unconscious tendency to lean towards saying “yes” or “no” when opportunity presents itself in life.

If you really think about it, even a slight preference towards saying “yes” or “no” to the unfathomable amount of potentials we encounter throughout a lifetime is probably hard to overstate. For this reason, many have argued for conscious consideration of our often unconscious answer.

The kicker is everyone seems to advocate for a different answer.

Some are all about saying “yes.” Others are all about saying “no.” There are books and movies about the power of saying “yes” and writers who say “no” to everything except writing books and movies. A third school of thought also exists in the space between yes and no, interestingly, without the inertia of maybe.

The further you get into it, the more complicated and complex the question of yes or no becomes. It is, however, worth a dive into the complexity because the yes or no we unconsciously lean towards has tremendous influence on the decisions that shape our lives.

The following is an excerpt from the August 2020 edition of my monthly Late Night Letters. Usually written the last night of each month, I sent this one out a few nights late to coincide with the five year anniversary of this blog. Reading it again recently, I realized it speaks well to the why of the past, present, and future of this project — so I thought to publish it in the blog itself.

A mile outside the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park, at the bottom of a glacially carved valley 7,389ft in elevation, sits Silver Gate, Montana — an island of humanity among a sea of mountainous wilderness. At the height of summer, the population can swell to perhaps two hundred. However, only eight residents call Silver Gate home year-round and the town’s unanimously elected mayor is a dog named Rommel. Besides a handful of privately owned cabins, the town consists of two small general stores, two lodging businesses, and a restaurant.

Bigger towns surrounding Yellowstone, with large advertising budgets and shorter drives to world-famous “Old Faithful,” attract a vast majority of the park’s visitors. To this day, Silver Gate and Cooke City (its neighboring town three miles up the road), remain less trodden outposts of the little-known Yellowstone High Country. Rather than geysers, Silver Gate is about wilderness, wildlife, and mountains.

“To travel or not to travel?” is the most common question I receive as a writer of wanderings and thrifty travels.

Whether the aim is a specific place (especially Hawaii and New Zealand), a specific way (by bicycle or in a Honda Element home on wheels), a specific job (deckhand for American Cruise Lines, season work through CoolWorks), or a general inquiry about whether to travel or not, I answer this question in one form or another dozens of times each year.

A couple months ago, I received a general ask of the “to travel or not to travel?” question and figured I’d publish my response, highlighting my approach to the question and offering a bit of insight into why I venture out.

In school, we were taught about the migratory patterns of animals—south for the winter, north for the summer, etc. What we were not taught was that animals are not the only migratory inhabitants of Earth.

Little-known for its migratory nature, the rental car also heads for more temperate climates in the fall and spring each year in search of more frequent renters. Unlike most migratory species, though, the rental car is unable to migrate without a driver.

This is where we come in.

At the right time of the season, we can enter into a symbiotic relationship with a rental car and drive from one climate to another, at little cost to us. This gets a rental car where it wants to go, and gives us an abnormally inexpensive opportunity to fulfill our great American road trip dreams.

I released an application a couple weeks ago for a Chautauqua, a gathering with the purpose of exchanging ideas about how to live. It was meant to be a six-day experience of wilderness, introspection, and discussion hosted at the Range Rider's Lodge—a big, beautiful log cabin structure I manage in the summertime located a mere mile outside of Yellowstone National Park.

As the innkeeper of the Range Rider, I got a sweet deal to rent the entire building at the end of September. By day, I envisioned long hikes, mountain climbing, wolf watching, and exploration of some of Yellowstone's best, often overlooked areas. By night, a couple speeches and small group discussion of the things that underlie our actions in life. I envisioned us riding the high of alpine forests and breathtaking mountain vistas while we shared the whys and hows of our lives.

I was damn excited about this.

Nobody can hand you your pot of gold. There is no magic pill, no trump card we can play in life that wins every time.

Every once in a while, I pick up on a certain dissatisfaction in readers, readers of this site and other sites that I read. They're dissatisfied because they want the answer, not a way to go about finding it. In their search, they encounter ideas, strategies, and guidance, but all they want is the end product. The solution to their predicament without the work. No matter where they search, nobody seems to be offering it.

On such a quest we may look to carbon copy others' successes, only to find that what worked for someone else doesn't work for us. Unlike Steve Jobs, it's no longer the 1970's, and we're not friends with a Steve Wozniak who's building an electronic device that could revolutionize the world. Unlike Tim Ferriss, we don't have a bestselling author like Jack Canfield to advise us in writing and promoting our first book. I've been told that I'm lucky to have almost died at sixteen years old because it gave me such a powerful story for my cross-country bicycling fundraiser.

Holocaust survivor, legendary psychiatrist, and author of the life-quaking book Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl's work has impacted (and continues to impact) millions of people.

In this clip, specifically his plane landing analogy, he illustrates why one must aim beyond their potential in order to reach it.

A couple years ago, my brother Reid and I drove down from Phoenix, AZ towards the Mexican border for an overnight backpacking trip. I'd read online somewhere that Mount Wrightson's summit was the best place to stargaze in the contiguous United States. The peak towers nearly 7,000ft above the surrounding desert floor and exists far enough away from any light source to provide an almost completely unobstructed view of the night sky.

We'd planned it out perfectly. The forecast called for a moonless, cloudless night. After toiling for five hours skyward in the heat of a summer desert afternoon, we reached the top.

More than a mile above the surrounding landscape, hundreds of swallows whizzed around us with unbelievable speed, dive bombing their last meal of airborne bugs before nightfall. We cooked a large can of sloppy joes on my backpacking stove as the landscape faded from hues of light orange into dark purples.

As you may have noticed on The Living Theory's splash page, the background photo is of two skydivers. The photograph was taken this May. I'm in the upper left, in the bottom right corner is my grandma. Her name is Fran. Everyone at the skydiving facility seemed to think it was amazing that at 84 years old, she wanted to jump out the door of a plane from 10,000ft above the earth.

Everyone that is, except her.

So for my first interview for The Living Theory, I feel she's the ideal subject and her story, a perfect portrayal of what this site is about. Without further ado, my grandma, Fran Rice, 84 years of age and still young.

What social psychologist Amy Cuddy presents here is remarkable – the mind doesn't just influence the body, the body also influences the mind. Striking a “power pose” for two minutes causes a scientifically documented increase in confidence (testosterone level) and decrease in stress (cortisol level).

This finding is profound! And it's applicable to our everyday lives. In any stressful situation (job interview, public speaking, evaluation, competition etc.) a two minute “power pose” can make you more confident and less stressed.